Over the past decade a new breed of digital company has emerged, quickening the tempo of business. Digital natives such as Spotify, AirBnB and Uber have delivered more convenient, responsive and engaging experiences for customers – and often disrupted entire industry business models while doing so. As “digital natives” their intrinsic use of digital technologies such as cloud, mobile and analytics means that they continue to evolve and scale at speeds that are unthinkable for traditional organizations.
Today the potential impacts of digitization extend beyond these digital natives and are a pressing issue for businesses spanning almost every industry. As more people, systems and things become inter-connected, so the scope to create new and novel digital value chains rapidly increases. Understanding the impact of these changes and successfully evolving to avoid or exploit disruption is therefore critical to survival. But while there is a broad recognition of the dangers of inaction there is also much confusion; a recent landmark survey by Fujitsu1 found that this lack of clarity results in two in three digital projects being considered a gamble.
